AS you might imagine, someone born Gwendoline Emily Meacham in Kent was bound to become a leading Scottish nationalist. But Wendy Wood, the artist formerly known as Gwendoline, was Scottish by family background.

Challenged about her Scottish birthright, she’d reply with a variation on “Being born in a stable does not make one a horse”, a proverb attributed to the Duke of Wellington, a famous Britisher born in Ireland.

Wendy Wood was born on October 29, 1892 in yonder Maidstone, a stop on her parents’ journey from Scotland to South Africa, where her father, Charles, a chemist, became a brewery manager. 

A keen landscape painter, he founded the South African Society of Artists.  Wendy’s mammy, Florence, was granddaughter of a Highland crofter. A painter of flowers who thrilled wee Wendy with tales of William Wallace, she worked as a nurse during the Boer War.

Wendy was a wild child, frequently sent home from school for outrageous behaviour, so her parents sent her to the private Hamilton House School for Girls in, er, Tunbridge Wells.

Before she was 15, Wendy had enrolled at a London art studio run by Walter Sickert, a luminary of the Camden post-impressionists. Aye, thaim.

Aged 19, she married Ayr-based footwear manufacturer Walter Cuthbert and, in 1913, the couple toured Scotland by motor car, during which a visit to the Wallace Monument in Stirling had a lasting effect on the lass. 

In 1916, she joined the Scottish League and, in 1918, the Home Rule Association.

During the First World War, she gave birth to daughters Cora and Irralee and, all this time, kept painting, in a studio her husband had built for her. 

She signed her works Gwen Cuthbert or G.E.C. before taking her mother’s maiden name, with its family connection to sculptor Samuel Peploe Wood, her maternal grandfather, and to her great-uncle, the painter Thomas Peploe Wood. Hence Wood’s guiding slogan: Power to the Peploe.

Party girl
In pursuit of power to the peeps, Wood became a founder of the National Party of Scotland, which became the SNP. 

She began speaking tours of Scotland, mostly conducted by van, accompanied by trusty volunteers, a tent that slept six, and colourful banners designed by Wood herself. She averaged 32 public meetings a year and, in 1957, spoke at 73. 

On one tour, she and her desperadoes pulled down the lightning conductor from the statue of the Duke of Sutherland at Golspie.

Not the sort of activity likely to appeal to the staid National Party (one of whose members spat in her face). Before long, Wendy decided a non-party approach to independence would be more effective, an idea enjoying resurgence today.

In June 1932, The Glasgow Herald reported Wood’s outrage at the Union flag flying over Stirling Castle on Bannockburn Day. 

“Who will volunteer to take it down?” she asked a crowd. More than 100 young men and women did so, and Wood led them forth.

The Herald: Wendy Wood, left

A castle guide demanding six pence a head entrance money was treated “with merriment”. As The Herald noted, successful entry was facilitated by the resident Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders being away on their annual sports day.

As the Union flag was duly replaced with a Lion Rampant, four soldiers appeared and bravely threatened the invaders with the polis. 

As soon as the scoundrels were gone, they took down the Scottish Standard and hauled up the Union flag once more.

The National Party issued a statement condemning the militants’ act of “cheap sensationalism”, and restated its position of “complete loyalty to the British Commonwealth of Nations whose symbol is the Union Jack”. I am not joking. The statement added that, on Bannockburn Day, the party had sent a telegram of support to the monarch in England as “King of Scots”.

Billys goat gruff
IN July 1933, yon Special Branch noted that Wood had become chairwoman of the Democratic Scottish Self-Government Organisation (DSSO) which advocated direct action. It was so successful it was threatened by Communists and the Billy Boys. Strange bedfellows.

In the 1930s, Wood founded Scottish Watch, a youth organisation promoting Caledonian culture. It became bigger in Scotland than Baden Powell’s Scouting movement. Leading academics and writers gave talks but, more depressingly, mass dances took place outside Holyrood House and on the Castle Esplanade.

In 1946, Wood stood as an independent during a by-election in the unpromising sounding territory of Glasgow Bridgeton. She didn’t win, but she did get 2,575 votes and saved her deposit.

In 1949, she founded the Scottish Patriots and, in the following decade, led protests against the “Elizabeth II” motif on postboxes and elsewhere in Scotland, the country never having had an Elizabeth I.

From 1956, Wood shared an art studio and hoose in Embra with her partner, Florence St John Cadell, cousin of “Bunty” of that ilk and one of the Easterhouse St John Cadells.

In 1961, seeking support to reconvene the Scottish Parliament, she addressed the General Doodah of the Church of Scotland, the first female to do so since Lady Liverpool in 1931.

Wood backed other causes. She supported Indian independence and came out for Iceland in the Cod Wars. She went to prison three times, the first for disrupting a rally by the British Union of Fascists in Edinburgh, the second as part of a deliberate ploy to experience conditions at Glasgow’s Duke Street prison, and the third for inciting Scotland fans in Trafalgar Square on the day of a game against England in 1951. 

During that last incident, she was beaten while arrested and went straight to hospital at Holloway, where she had a tough time of it.

UK hard to stomach
IN 1972, she embarked on a hunger strike for home rule. The Glasgow Herald of December 14 reported the “weak and … poorly” 80-year-old only ending her week-long fast after the UK Government published a Green Paper with proposals for a Scottish Assembly.

Besides this, she read Scottish stories on children’s TV programme Jackanory under the name Auntie Gwen, and wrote 10 books. Sir Compton Mackenzie dedicated his book On Moral Courage to her.

On October 1980, the Glasgow Herald reported the “grand old lady of Scottish nationalism” having no plans to take it easy.

But, on June 30, 1981, she went the way of all flesh, dying in Edinburgh, aged 88. In 2021, a small memorial was placed in the city’s Old Calton Cemetery. Above her dates it says simply: “Wendy Wood patriot.”